Forming, not breaking

Already I've skipped a day in posting something, but you see, yesterday I was a wee bit hungover. I don't go out much anymore, so sometimes when I do, I succumb to the bad habit of thinking that next drink is a great idea. It wasn't.

Anyway, this is another "house-keeping" post.  The reason I've called this "Habit Forming" rather than "Habit Breaking" is that someone suggested to me that forming a habit is easier than breaking one. I've very suggestible, so I took this to the (logical (to me)) conclusion that I should not think of myself as breaking any habit, but rather as replacing them with newly formed habits.

This also appeals to me in a reward-vs-punishment way. When I fall down on breaking a bad habit, I can feel pretty guilty and discouraged. Plus, the result of breaking a habit is the absence of something; that doesn't score well in the "tangible rewards" department.  

But forming a new habit is easier on the optimism: the results of my hard work in building a new habit are generally visible. Flossing, for example: My teeth look and feel great. It's good encouragement to continue. Or this blog: Sure I missed a day, but now I can make up for it and feel good about my ability to fulfill this commitment, plus I can see my posts. Neat.

It's certainly hard either way, and I don't know how much I truly believe one method is harder than the other in reality, but given a choice between pessimism and optimism - even false optimism - I'll take gamble on the positive any day.

Which, as I'm thinking about it, is why I had that vodka tonic. Well... onward!

Organization, another poorly-formed habit

When I toyed with  the idea for this blog, I initially wondered if I should just tackle one habit at a time, for 21 days each. It would certainly make the blog organized and easy to follow.

The problem arose when I realized that not all the habits I need to form are daily habits. And on top of that, what would posts look like? "Day 17 of Forming a Face-Washing Habit: I did it!"  Even I wouldn't want to read that and I'm pretty obsessed with myself. Might as well make myself a checklist and keep it to myself, right?

So I think that I will blog once per day - habit of blogging - and write about that day's efforts at habits. And then let the tags/labels/whatever they're called sort it all out by subject.

Let's see if blogging will become a habit

So in a couple of weeks is my 30th birthday. And while I've made many strides in my life and am generally cool with how I've turned out, this birthday looms large in my mind. I'm not so concerned with aging, but have become borderline-obsessed with the bad habits I'm taking into this new decade.

I've got a lot of bad habits, and not many good ones. I did start flossing every day; that was a great habit to form. I dutifully marked off 21 days and now indeed, it is a habit even 8 months later. But other habits have proven difficult to form. And breaking bad habits? It's harder than just telling myself to stop it already.

I tried journaling, but it turns out that the inability to keep a journal is another bad habit. Then I thought that perhaps writing in public - regardless of readership - would help me feel accountable by forcing at least the journaling part to be habitual. But who knows? Maybe it'll last, maybe you'll stop by in a month and still find this as the only post.